Chuck Wendig

It's autumn in Harrow, but something is changing in the town besides the season. Because in that town there is an orchard, and in that orchard grows a new sort of apple: strange and beautiful, with skin so red it's nearly black. Take a bite of one of these apples and you will become stronger. More vital. More yourself, you will believe. But soon your appetite for the apples and their peculiar gifts will keep growing - and become darker.

This is what happens when the townsfolk discover the secret of the orchard. Soon it seems that everyone is consumed by an obsession with the magic of the apples… And then a stranger has come to town, a stranger who knows Harrow's secrets. Because it's harvest time, and the town will soon reap what it has sown.

When Nate's father dies, he leaves behind a final gift for his son: his childhood home. Married now, Nate decides to move in with his wife, Maddie, and their son, Oliver, seeking peace from the chaos of the city. But it doesn't take long before things get strange in the night and even stranger by day. Because Nate was a child being abused by his father, and has never told his family. Because Maddie was a little girl who saw something she shouldn't have. Because something sinister, something hungry, walks in the tunnels and the mountains and the coal mines of this town in rural Pennsylvania... And now, what happened all those years ago is happening again, and this time, it is happening to Oliver. When he meets a strange boy with secrets of his own and a taste for dark magic, he has no idea that what comes next will put his family at the heart of a battle of good versus evil.

Shana wakes up one morning to discover her little sister in the grip of a strange malady. She appears to be sleepwalking. She cannot talk and cannot be woken up. And she is heading with inexorable determination to a destination that only she knows. But Shana and her sister are not alone. Soon they are joined by a flock of sleepwalkers from across America, on the same mysterious journey. And, like Shana, there are other "shepherds" who follow the flock to protect their friends and family on the long dark road ahead.

As the rest of society collapses all around them - and an ultraviolent militia threatens to exterminate them - the fate of the sleepwalkers depends on unraveling the mystery behind the epidemic. The terrifying secret will either tear the nation apart - or bring the survivors together to remake a shattered world.

Five years ago, they walked across America to a destination only they knew. The sleepwalkers, as the rest of the country named them, were followed by their shepherds: friends and family who gave up everything to protect them.
They finally stopped in Ouray, a small town of Colorado that would become one of the last outposts of human civilisation. Because the sleepwalking epidemic was just the first in a chain of events that led to the end of the world - and the birth of a new one.

The shepherds and the sleepwalkers, now awake, strive to rebuild the world that was taken from them. Among them are Benji, the scientist struggling through grief to lead; Marcy, the former police officer who just wants to protect those she loves; and Shana, the first to become a shepherd and whose bravery is sorely needed.

But the people of Ouray are not the only survivors, and the world they're building is fragile. Cruelty builds under the leadership of self-proclaimed president Ed Creel, and in the very heart of Ouray itself is Black Swan, the A.I. who dreamt up the apocalypse.